A desperate single mother moves with her three children into the notorious, supposedly haunted, real-life Amityville house to try and use its dark powers to cure her comatose son. Things go horribly wrong.

Five medical students, obsessed by what lies beyond the confines of life, embark on a daring experiment: by stopping their hearts for short periods, each triggers a near-death experience - giving them a firsthand account of the afterlife.

Storyline

Belle, her little sister, and her comatose twin brother move into a new house with their single mother Joan in order to save money to help pay for her brother's expensive healthcare. But when strange phenomena begin to occur in the house including the miraculous recovery of her brother, Belle begins to suspect her Mother isn't telling her everything and soon realizes they just moved into the infamous Amityville house.Written by
The Weinstein Company

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A mother and her two kids move into the Amityville house. There's the teen daughter, Belle, the younger daughter Juliet, the dog. The mom's got a sister too. No men allowed pretty much. Oh, well, there's James, but he's in a coma and kept home. It's Belle's senior year of course and while everyone knows she lives at the Amityville house, she doesn't now anything about it. Until a classmate tries to befriend her and tells her all about the place but because he's male he's the butt of jokes and treated like crap by Belle and some other girl he introduces her to.

Back at the house, the dog barks at stuff, there are shadows, there are pesky flies and Belle starts having vivid nightmares about James. We learn that James is in a coma because of a fight he got into defending Belle, so she is bizarrely held responsible by the mother. There's some type of magic circle still around some area of the front lawn somehow.

Even though the doctor and most of the family think that James is in a coma for good, the mom, who gave up religion because of this situation, is convinced James will recover. And sure enough he does, at a rather amazing pace. The kids suspect James might be possessed and they are right. So somehow Belle will have to save the family before as the fully recovered James goes homicidal.

Even for a PG-13 horror movie, Amityville: The Awakening, is remarkably dull, lame, uninteresting. It's hard to connect with the arrogant Belle. Much of the characters' behavior is nonsensical. Worst of all, there is zero sense of dread, nothing is really at stake here. It's 10 minutes before the movie ends that finally things become deadly. By then of course it's way too late to get some excitement going. Not to mention that this movie doesn't even look good. It's the kind of movie where it's pitch black most of the time and none of the characters think about turning a friggin' light on. Darkness alone doesn't make a horror movie, let alone a good one. The only frightening thing about this movie is how bad it is.

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